up yours, cosmic wossnames

So, that techno-jinx is alive and well and feeling free to infect anything remotely technological in my immediate vicinity on a more or less random basis. I'm driving the EL's car at the moment, his old Elantra, as achieving a new car without a valid driver's licence is proving bloody difficult. Today, on the way home from shopping, it picked up an extremely flat tyre on the far corner of Rondebosch Common from our place. Interesting points about said flat tyre fall into place with a sort of inexorable, bloody-minded beauty:

1. I am generally perfectly capable of changing a flat tyre, with the trifling proviso that my buggered left arm gives me limited strength for wrestling two-handed with anything that's been fastened very tightly. Like, just for example, wheel nuts.
   
2. Oh, and like the weird screw fixture thingy which appears to fasten the spare tyre onto the bottom of the boot in the Elantra. Can't budge it. Immune to swearing, hitting with heavy things and every ounce of muscle I possess. In the Changing The Tyre stakes, I have fallen at the first hurdle.
   
3. My exertions are lacking a certain element of confidence given that it's not my car and I'm not even sure I'm swearing at the right fiddly bit.
   
4. A further lack of commitment is evinced in my sneaking memory that the spare tyre on the Elantra is actually the wrong size, anyway.
   
5. I cannot phone the EL and check any of the above because he's in the garage industriously crafting pewter, and he doesn't hear the landline ringing from the garage. Nor does he have his cellphone with him, because Evil Landlord.
   
6. A half-hour process of swearing at the immovable screw fitting, interspersed with intervals of phoning both lines repeatedly or sitting in the car frantically googling "change Elantra spare tyre" on my phone, is rendered rather more horrible by my sneaking awareness that as a good feminist and marginally self-sufficient person I should damned well be able to sort this out for myself.
   
7. The knowledge that the EL is perfectly capable of sitting in the garage for upwards of hours at a time peaceably pewtering, adds a slightly despairing note to the whole proceedings.

Eventually I got the hell in, locked up the car and stomped home across the common, arriving, as the bloody cosmic wossnames would have it, just as the EL had emerged from his pewter session into the house. He confirms that my memory is perfectly accurate and the spare tyre wouldn't have fitted, anyway. Despite the fact that I wasn't even particularly homicidal, he then volunteered to go and sort it out, i.e. remove the flat tyre and pick up my three big heavy bags of shopping, which I'd left stashed in the boot, an offer I gratefully accepted.

I need a cup of tea. Or a gin. Or a cup of tea and then a gin. I like this plan.